6

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE SOVIET UNION

There had been rumours, but now it was official: after twenty years at the helm and twenty years of ill health, General Secretary Brezhnev was dead.

Galina had never known life without him; a toddler when he became leader, she had just turned twenty-one. His image graced each of her classrooms, it was posted on walls and shop fronts, it headlined the TV and newspapers. But now bull-faced Brezhnev, with his grizzled eyebrows and his slack skimpy lips, was dead.

Her mother had always been scathing about him and damning of life under his leadership. The food he promised never appeared, the goods that would have made life easier never materialised; only the military forces and the nuclear arsenal expanded, and the space program, too. But what was the use of sending men into space if people on the ground didn’t have enough to eat? These things Lidiya said in private to Galina, who had learned from her earliest years that what was said at home stayed at home. Brezhnev filled her mother with rage. The Soviet Union wasn’t poor. There was money enough to squash the Poles when they became too independent, and the Czechs when they became too Western, money enough for all manner of emergency. So there must be plenty of money for ordinary people to have better lives.

‘We’re told all the time that things are getting better. That steel production is up, food production is up, oil production is up, new apartments up, factories up, electricity plants up. Everything is up, yet our pathetic lives sink ever lower.

‘Things are getting better? Not a chance. It’s just pokazukha, window dressing.’ Lidiya shook her head in disgust. ‘There may well be people, poor deluded people, who will genuinely mourn our recently departed general secretary, but I’m not among them.’

The funeral for Brezhnev would be held in Moscow, but the entire Soviet Union would mark his passing. Schools, offices and factories would close, and everyone would have the day off to mourn the great leader. Lidiya proposed they make the best of it with their own funeral feast.

‘Ours will be a farewell-and-good-riddance feast,’ she said. ‘Although I can’t imagine his replacement will be any better.’

So it happened on Monday, 15th November, 1982, that Galina and her mother spent much of the day in front of the TV, with an array of delicious food. The dead man meant nothing to them, and the movement of the funeral was ponderously slow, yet something was compelling them to watch.

‘We Russians have an unhealthy tolerance for punishment,’ her mother said wryly.

But it wasn’t some undesirable national trait that kept Galina watching, it was the event itself. From the very beginning, with the cameras gliding over Brezhnev lying in state in the cavernous hall of the House of the Unions, it was a spectacle. Dead Brezhnev was perched atop a gargantuan pyre decorated with red flowers and a thicket of greenery. A small orchestra was playing to one side, and numerous sombre officials were hanging about, looking like they needed some occupation.

‘All these men guarding the great leader,’ her mother said. ‘As if anyone would want to spirit him away.’

Then came the procession itself: guns, machinery, flowers, banners, bands, medal-bearers, and masses of men in military dress, all of them bulked out in grey coats and wearing their silly peaked caps. Galina had seen men like this before, she’d seen state funerals before, but Brezhnev’s was the biggest show of all.

Once the procession was underway, the cameras panned between the proceedings and the huge crowds lining the route.

‘I wonder what bribes were given to those people to make them forfeit their day off,’ Lidiya muttered.

Galina, too, was focused on the crowd. ‘Seems that few women took up the offer.’

‘Women have more sense than men,’ her mother said quickly. ‘They certainly have less time.’ She helped herself to another spoonful of creamy mushrooms. ‘The women who have to cook and clean and care for children, and hold down jobs as well, they don’t mourn this man.’

It was a perennial complaint of her mother’s that all the revolutionary promises to women had never been fulfilled. When Lidiya was a child back in the 1930s, women were already assuming the double burden of domestic labour and outside employment. ‘It was too much even for a Soviet superwoman,’ she said. ‘If a woman believed in her work, then the domestic sphere suffered; if she didn’t, by this time many women lacked the heart and the resources to make a proper home. Cooking was a drudgery. Life was a drudgery.

‘Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, these leaders come and go, but the hardship for Soviet women endures.’ Lidiya nodded at the TV screen. ‘No sensible women would mourn this man.’

This was probably wishful thinking on the part of her mother — not that Galina had a better explanation for the lack of women mourners. It was certainly not the cold that kept them away: after a series of wintry days the weather had actually improved. Indeed, if you believed in God you’d think he was personally managing Brezhnev’s farewell. For this man, who throughout his life could never have too much pomp and ceremony, there would be no rain or snow on his final parade.

They tried to slow their eating to keep pace with the funeral. This was a mighty challenge for her mother, who always gobbled her food — a lifelong hangover, she said, from the starvation years of the blokada. After the mushrooms, they started on the smoked fish and the pickled vegetables. The most plodding, most leaden version of Chopin’s funeral march was playing — enough to turn you off Chopin forever, Galina was thinking, and she went to check on the pirozhki heating in the oven. Filled with meat and not their usual potato, this was her favourite of the feast food.

She returned to the couch with the pirozhki, and settled again in front of the TV. It was said that Andropov would be the new leader. Andropov, like all the Soviet leaders, was old, and he’d been a member of the power elite for as long as she could remember; there’d be no change if he were in charge. He was standing in the centre of a group of dignitaries observing the parade. Leading the legions of military men was the pillar-box-red coffin, borne aloft by a gun carriage, and towed by an armoured tank so small Galina wondered if it had been made specially for parades and funerals. There followed a multitude of wreaths, each arrangement so large it required two men to carry it.

Her mother was laughing. ‘It looks like an unfixed forest, like mobile Birnam Wood in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.’

Following the forest of wreaths, there were forty or fifty military men, each carrying a miniature red cushion on which was displayed one or more of Brezhnev’s hundreds of medals. Then came huge battalions of soldiers and navy men and other military officials, many of them marching in a slow-motion goose-step, their arms swinging similarly slowly.

‘I bet they’re aching all over,’ Galina said.

Lidiya did not respond. She had stopped eating. She was staring at the TV screen. The camera had zoomed in on the medals and their bearers. Brezhnev was known to prize his medals; even when dressed in civilian clothes, he would always have one or two pinned to his lapel. Galina assumed that to be a medal-bearer at his funeral was a special honour, given only to trusted members of his inner circle. She was thinking how absurd they looked, these block-shaped, heavy-featured men, each carrying a delicate red cushion, when her mother spoke in an odd, strangled voice.

‘I know him,’ she was on her feet and prodding the TV screen. ‘That one there,’ she said more loudly, pointing to one of the medal-bearers. The camera shifted to the crowds lining the street, but still Lidiya stood, her finger on the screen. ‘I know him. I’d know him anywhere.’

The procession continued, the voices of the commentators tolled on, the music played. Her mother stood motionless by the TV; it was hard to know whether she was distressed, or confused, or just plain surprised.

Lidiya turned around slowly. She looked as if exiting a dream. ‘That was my brother,’ she said, marking each word with care. ‘That was Mikhail. There, on the TV, one of Brezhnev’s medal-bearers. My brother, Misha.’

She returned to the screen. Galina could see her willing the camera to return to the medal-bearers.

‘Misha must be,’ Lidiya was frowning, ‘he must be sixty. That would make him twenty years older than my father was when he was taken away. Twenty years older and a good deal fatter, yet such a strong resemblance.’

Galina had met this uncle only once, a dozen years earlier when he’d turned up at their old home at the kommunalka. He’d arrived without warning, he’d taken what he wanted, and he’d left never to return.

‘He’s done well for himself,’ Lidiya said softly.

Now Galina watched, too. She had always wanted a brother or a sister, so to have a brother from whom you were estranged made no sense to her. But when Mikhail had appeared all those years ago, her mother had just wanted him gone.

‘Trust me,’ she had said at the time. ‘Trust me to know what’s best for you.’

Now Lidiya poured herself some of their special Armenian brandy; she tossed it down like vodka, and immediately poured another. Galina remained silent. The funeral plodded on. The brother appeared several more times. To her, he looked like any other high Soviet official: fat, neckless, bovine, old. That he resembled dedushka Yuri, the grandfather she had never known, the father to whom Lidiya remained devoted, was hard to comprehend. What had happened all those years ago? What had happened to make her mother hate her own brother?

When the funeral was over, Lidiya stood up and crossed to the window. She stared down into the street. It was dark outside, and her figure was reflected in the glass: one hand shaded her eyes, and her mouth was tight. Galina wondered if she was crying and wanted to go to her, comfort her, but why would her mother be standing over there unless she needed to be alone? At last Lidiya turned and came to the couch. She reached for Galina’s hands.

It was time to talk of the past, she said in a soft voice. It was time for Galina to know the full story. The words came slowly, as if she were still unsure of the right course of action.

Lidiya had often spoken about her own paternal grandparents, the cigar-making grandfather and the embroiderer grandmother, and her maternal grandparents, both of whom had been tailors. But about her own parents, Vera and Yuri Kogan, she had been largely silent.

‘This was a calculated decision,’ she now said. ‘I thought it was a cruel mother who’d saddle her child with a spoiled biography.’ She shrugged. ‘I still do. But there comes a time when you need your history. You need it to explain your country, and you need it to explain who you are. It’s time,’ she said. ‘It’s time to know where you’ve come from.’

The story of the Kogan family went back a long way, as Russian stories tended to do — before Stalin, before Lenin and the Revolution, before the 1905 uprising, before the Crimean Wars, before the tribe of Alexanders and Nicholases, before great Peter himself, right back to the famed rabbis of Prague.

‘But I’ll start in the early 1890s,’ Lidiya said. ‘With my own grandparents, your great-grandparents.’

She settled back on the couch, and her voice assumed a storytelling lilt. ‘My grandfather was a cigar-maker and my grandmother an embroiderer. They were considered useful Jews, and so were permitted to live in St Petersburg.’ Lidiya reached for a framed picture and handed it to Galina. ‘They knew how fortunate they were — their lives being so much better than those they’d left behind in the Pale. And they were fortunate, in every respect they were fortunate, except they had no children.’

Galina studied the young couple in the picture. They looked so serious, or perhaps they just looked sad, this couple that were unable to have children.

‘For years they longed for a child, and for years they were disappointed. Then, just when they’d given up hope, my grandmother found herself pregnant.’ Lidiya was smiling. ‘Their baby would be Yuri, my father, your grandfather.

‘In Russia’s long history there have been bad times, worse times, and the very worst times. This period when my grandmother became pregnant counted among the worst. People would notice her condition and say it was a terrible time to be bringing a baby into the world, people with four, five, six children of their own. Some would say there was never a good time to bring a Jewish baby into the world, but my grandparents were overjoyed.

‘My grandfather and grandmother were good at their crafts, but there was never enough work nor enough people able to pay. Life for them in St Petersburg might have been better than in the Pale, but it was still tough. Cholera was more common than a full stomach, and typhus more tenacious than ice in winter. Then, in 1891, with the pregnancy well underway, a new deportation occurred. St Petersburg Jews were dragged from their rooms, they were rounded up in the streets: no warning, no explanation, no time to pack up lives that had taken root over decades, no opportunity to calm the children, care for the elderly, or collect provisions. Amid all this, my grandparents, who had thought they would remain childless, were convinced of a miracle. That they escaped the deportation was another miracle. And when their son was born, they named him Yuri, a good Russian name to take into a future where, according to their hopes and dreams, everyone, including Jews, would be equal.’

Yuri Kogan grew to be a strong boy, in every respect he was strong except his eyes. This boy, who loved reading and writing, and who particularly loved numbers, wore spectacles as thick as window panes. Rich Petersburgers were installing the new electricity in their homes — light as dazzling as a hundred candles, so it was said — but for the Kogans, electricity was as remote as the stars. They heard of a way to make an oil-lamp burn more brightly by inserting a strip of tin to spread the flame. It helped, and Yuri’s poor eyesight did not matter quite so much anymore.

For hours on end, young Yuri would sit at a bench in the glow of his special light, blond curls falling over his face, a pencil in his grip as he explored the patterns in numbers. So exceptional was his skill in maths that no quota against Jews could keep him from the gimnaziya.

It quickly emerged that Yuri embraced all learning; whether literature, languages or philosophy, he mastered everything he tackled. With a book in his hands, he could forget he was hungry, he could forget he was cold, he could forget that the soles of his shoes had worn through to the cardboard, and his best friend had sickened and died. Learning supplied him with all the pleasures and experiences lacking in his own meagre life, and there was simply no stopping him. Although the bullies at school did try.

No one, he quickly discovered, likes a clever kid, particularly a clever Jewish kid. There were bruisings, and plenty of them, and nasty taunts, some of which he didn’t even understand. Eventually he found the perfect solution: appeasing the school bullies with cigar ends collected from around his father’s cutting machine.

He studied hard, but when his parents talked about the great socialist revolution, he put his schoolwork aside to listen. This utopia, which would provide work, food and reliable shelter to all Russians, would most certainly come. And how wonderful it would be for the Kogans, and all people like them.

Life now, though, was not fair. Yuri saw the huge palaces where rich people lived in warm rooms, waited on by vast numbers of servants. He heard about tables laden with food, and whole rooms just for sleeping. He gazed at bejewelled churches with spires clad in gold, and fat priests wrapped in ornamental robes. He saw rich children swaddled in furs and coddled by nurses; rosy-skinned and chubby-cheeked, these children had less in common with him than would a mouse. Where he lived, babies died and children sickened, teeth were agony, cuts festered, he was always cold and meat existed only in dreams. With the perennial pogroms against the Jews, with the Ruskoye Znamye pumping out anti-Semitic vitriol day after day, with the rich in their palaces and the poor squashed into rickety rooms, life was definitely not fair.

What was it about his country, about Mother Russia, that made living so hard and death so easy? And when he asked his parents, he always received the same answer: the revolution would change everything; the revolution would bring a good life to all.

The failed uprising of 1905 brought a few minor changes, but didn’t result in fewer rats and more food, nor less cold and better health, at least not for the Kogans. By the time Yuri was a student at university, conditions had actually gone backwards. Yuri buried himself in mathematics and tried to ignore the hardships, but not even he was immune to a raft of new Jewish statutes running to nearly one thousand pages that impinged on every aspect of life — including university study. There were reduced quotas for university entrance, and when enrolled, there were quotas to sit for exams. So a Jew could attend the classes, could do the work, and at the end of the course be denied the examinations and the subsequent credentials. Yuri kept his head down, he pushed himself harder, he wanted to believe that as long as his work was appreciated he would be safe.

With quotas to practise certain professions, quotas for hospital admissions, quotas for cemetery plots, quotas for practically everything, other Jews were not so fortunate. Most of the new statutes struck Yuri as plain ludicrous. Jews were permitted to sit on juries, but couldn’t act as foreman. They could be members of a military band, but not lead one. Jewish soldiers from other parts of Russia could pass through St Petersburg, but weren’t allowed to spend their furlough in the city. When his own girlfriend, Masha, together with many of her friends, registered as domestic servants in order to keep their residency in St Petersburg, these absurd laws came disturbingly close. ‘What happens if the authorities discover you’re not a maid?’ he asked. Masha shrugged, she would deal with it if it happened. And then she laughed. ‘I could have registered as a prostitute like my cousin Rosa.’ Yuri did not laugh. What was funny about prostitutes and maids gaining residency, when a doctor or a lawyer could not? What was funny about young Jewish women registering as maids and prostitutes in order to finish their studies?

He managed to hold his place at the university, he managed to do his exams, he managed to graduate as the top student in mathematics, he managed to get a job teaching at the university, and that’s where he was working when the war with Austria and Germany broke out. Suddenly, ethnicity didn’t matter anymore. Whether you were Russian, Jewish, Armenian, or a hermit from Azerbaijan, if you were fit enough to fight, you fought for Mother Russia. And Yuri wanted to fight — what young man didn’t? But even if his eyesight had been perfect, his maths would have kept him away from the front line.

Wars need the numbers men. Yuri counted troops, horses and vehicles, and shifted them across the map; he measured out metres of barbed wire, and distributed them across the battlefields; he mobilised uniforms, boots, weapons, tobacco. Throughout those brutal years, Yuri, together with fellow mathematicians, moved the men and the necessities of war. And he counted off the dead and wounded too — staggering numbers of his fellow countrymen. As the numbers soared, he blamed the czar and his aristocratic military men. And he longed for the people’s revolution.

He thought it couldn’t come soon enough, but when the revolution finally did happen, it couldn’t have been at a worse time. Only later did he realise that it was precisely because life couldn’t get any worse that the revolution happened when it did. Russia was losing the war with Germany. The enemy was in striking distance of Petrograd. All the usual hardships were rampant — hunger, cold, disease — but now millions of war casualties, soldiers and civilians alike, were added to the toll.

It is 1917, February, during the Russian winter, when the first uprising occurs. The rouble, already harshly devalued, plunges still further. Food is scarce, fuel is scarcer, and transport is a memory. You have some potatoes, you swap them for fuel; you have your mother’s pendant, you swap it for boots. In March, the czar abdicates; the Romanov dynasty is finished, and the aristocracy of yesterday flees. Yuri has longed for this day, but it is impossible to rejoice when daily life is such a grind. He goes to his job because, revolution or no revolution, the war continues. Meanwhile the search for fuel becomes all-consuming. Palaces are plundered, churches are burned, mansions are looted. Into the stove go gilt chairs, carved bedheads, ornate picture frames, rare books; the spoils of the czars are keeping the Bolsheviks from freezing.

Hardship, pain, misery — it seems to Yuri these are infinitely elastic. You think you are experiencing the worst, whether of hunger or cold or enemy attacks, you think you can’t take any more, but conditions do worsen and you do manage to survive. The European war drags on. Cholera and typhus are rife, influenza is simmering, babies are dying, children are starving. Only lice are thriving.

‘People could learn a great deal from lice,’ he remarks to his mother one night when he arrives home to find their place reeking of karbolka, and his mother on her hands and knees scrubbing.

Yuri and his parents are hopeful, as are so many people, when Kerensky assumes the leadership of the provisional government. But daily life does not improve; there are simply too many factions, each advancing a different program for the new Russia. So they are relieved when, after a few more tumultuous months, the Bolsheviks assume power and the provisional government is dissolved. Lenin promises ‘peace, land, and bread’. It’s a rousing cry amid the dirge of war and deprivation.

‘The worst must surely be over,’ Yuri says to his mother one night.

The two of them are huddled over the burzhuika. Yuri had managed to scavenge some fuel, but the stove gobbled it as if it were famished; now any warmth is more imagined than real. With his father stretched out on the divan, sleeping, Yuri keeps his voice low. ‘Now the struggle must surely cease.’

It doesn’t. The glorious revolution segues into civil war. Russians are now killing Russians, and within the provinces, the bloodshed is further ramped up by ethnic and religious attacks against Armenians, Jews, Poles — all the usual targets. So much hatred and anger and resentment across all of greater Russia, even a committed Bolshevik like Yuri finds himself wondering how many more deaths it will take to bring about peace and prosperity. He estimates the number of dead so far to be at least nine million, surely enough in anyone’s terms. As for the future, he wants to work for the revolution, but the universities are in upheaval, and now that Russians are killing Russians, no one wants mathematicians counting the dead.

Throughout the cities and countryside, the Whites, the Mensheviks, and the Bolsheviks are fighting, each group against the others, and all of them against the Jews. In the pogroms of 1918 and 1919, two hundred thousand Jews are killed across the land. The Kogans are devastated; this is not the revolution they had hoped for. During the harshest winter in living memory, death attacks on several fronts: starvation, civil war, racial hatred, disease, and the fiercest cold.

And then, without warning, Yuri’s luck changes. He is given a job as a demographer in the newly established ZAGS: the Department of Registration of Civil Statuses, responsible for births, deaths, marriages, and other population statistics. At last, he’ll be working for the new Russia. And his luck doesn’t stop there: in the same month he starts at ZAGS he meets Vera. He knows from the very beginning that she’s the one for him. A teacher of English language and literature, she’s warm and spirited, strong and funny, and like him, she is ethnically Jewish. So certain is he that their future lies together, he could have proposed within days of their first meeting. But for the sake of propriety and the pleasures of courtship he delays. A few months later they marry. There are those who think they should wait — these are, after all, the toughest of times. But he and Vera say their marriage is for the revolution, it is for the future. They move in with his parents, into a pocket of space partitioned off by a bookcase and a curtain of newsprint. Two years later their baby son, Mikhail, joins them in their cubbyhole.

Like all young Bolsheviks, Yuri and Vera have always believed that come the revolution, all aspects of daily life would improve. But the new revolutionary society seems not to be working as it should, and many, indeed most hardships remain unchanged. They rationalise that it is, after all, only the earliest of days in a social program that is radical in every respect; that they must try to curb their impatience and, most of all, they must trust in Lenin. So when Vladimir Ilyich introduces his New Economic Policy they opt for a positive stance, even though they have some concerns. The new regulations under the NEP allow for a limited amount of private enterprise; the government hopes that concessions like this will fire up Russia’s economy. Yuri and Vera talk quietly together in their corner of the kommunalka while little Misha sleeps beside them; they wonder whether any level of private ownership can exist without resulting in inequality and exploitation. In the end, like most of their Bolshevik friends, they decide to accept the risks for a measure of peace and stability.

And life does improve. Food and material goods become more plentiful, buses and trams are more reliable, and there is even the possibility of a place of their own. So many positive changes as a result of the NEP, yet they hear of bourgeois excesses, they see over-consumption by a few to the detriment of the many, and they know there are people who are profiting over and above their needs.

The revolutionary state will eventually be built, they have no doubt of this, although they now realise it will take a good deal longer than they originally thought. Their trust in Lenin remains inviolate; it never occurs to them he won’t see the revolutionary transformation to its conclusion. So when his death is announced in the winter of 1924, it initially makes no sense. The great revolutionary leader dead? It’s not possible. He’s only fifty-three. He’s their leader. He wasn’t even sick. And when the truth does finally bite, they are heartbroken, all the people are. Their grief over Vladimir Ilyich is compounded by their fears for the revolution: with so much still to be done, the great and glorious future is in peril.

Their mood remains sombre, their fears will not settle. They’re aware of skirmishes among the potential successors, but the details are shuttered off from ordinary people. When Stalin emerges as the new leader, their anxieties ease. They know Stalin has a special understanding of the workers; he’s a committed revolutionary, a man of action, and he’s young. They hear rumours that some among the powerful are unhappy about the new leader, and that Lenin himself did not choose Stalin as his successor, but in a country where rumours blow through the landscape on the daily winds, Yuri and Vera choose to ignore them.

Their support for Stalin is vindicated when he announces his five-year plan. This strategy, with its large-scale collectivisation of farms in rural areas and industrialisation in the cities, will reverse the compromises made to private ownership by the NEP and, at the same time, restore the ideals of the revolution. With his plan, Stalin promises that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, established just a few years earlier, will be the envy of the world.

Vera’s second pregnancy coincides with Stalin’s announcement. Both within the Kogan home and further abroad in the vast Soviet territories, there’s reason for optimism. In 1928, in the early days of the five-year plan, Yuri and Vera’s daughter, Lidiya, is born. She arrives early by a full month, and is taken from the maternity hospital to the city shelter for premature children. For five long weeks, the longest of her life, Vera says, mother and infant are separated. When the baby is finally permitted to come home, Vera vows there will be no more separations for her family: the four of them will enjoy a long and fruitful life together in the new Russia.

In the years to come, Soviet lifetimes will prove precariously short. But for the moment, everyday life has improved for the Kogans. Yuri holds a senior post at ZAGS, and Vera is working at the new Institute of Languages; like other party members, their positions appear to be secure. Best of all, they have been given a place of their own. In a building not far from Yuri’s parents, they have been allocated what they regard as two rooms, but because the partition separating the two areas does not reach the ceiling, officially the space is designated as a single room. Two for the price of one, they joke. Within the rooms they have partitioned off smaller spaces, using bookcases and other furniture. The kitchen down one end of the passage, and the bathroom and toilet down the other are shared with only three other families, all of whom appear to be good and friendly folk. The wallpaper is only lightly marked, the burzhuika burns well, and their window faces south. And while there are ancient stains stretched like stormy clouds across the ceiling, it is a negligible failing when everything else is so favourable.

Perhaps because of Lidiya’s shaky start in life, or perhaps because Vera is more confident with a second child, she raises Lidiya differently from Mikhail. Despite the party’s insistence on exactly five feeds per twenty-four-hour period, Vera feeds Lidiya whenever she thinks she’s hungry; she picks her up whenever she cries, and she lavishes cuddles and kisses on her even though the party forbids such behaviour as unhygienic. Vera ignores practically all the party stipulations regarding the emotional hygiene of the Soviet baby.

‘I’m the mother,’ she says to Yuri. ‘I know what’s best for our child.’

In all other respects, however, she and Yuri remain good party members, though not without their concerns — different concerns now for these different times. Enemies of the people exist in what seem to be extraordinary numbers: priests, kulaks, bourgeois elements of all kinds. And despite what the party says, food shortages are worse than ever. Many is the night when Yuri and Vera go to sleep hungry, and they know their circumstances are better than most. When their doubts intrude too loudly, they have to remind themselves they are making history, that nothing like the Bolshevik state has existed before, and with so much needing to change, of course there will be occasional setbacks.

Huge posters adorn the streets and buildings. Some warn against enemies of the people, others depict industrious workers with complex machinery, most display the greatness and goodness of Stalin. A large number of the posters portray happy workers on collective farms, with lush fields of grain, carts laden with vegetables, and animals fatted for eating. So much produce in the posters, so little food in the shops.

Vera and Yuri know that as educated people and party members, they are not the target population for the posters: they don’t need convincing of the necessity for change. But still there are many that give them pause.

‘These posters, they’re so —’ Vera searches for the right word.

‘Banal?’ suggests Yuri.

‘No.’ She is shaking her head slowly. ‘Not banal. They’re exaggerated. They push the point too hard. They’re verging on the comical, the absurd.’

They’ve stopped in front of a poster they’ve not seen before, although at five below with a fierce wind raging they’ll not be stopping long. The poster seems more incongruous because the main figure, a happy boy of twelve or thirteen, is wearing short pants and a light shirt. This smug, summery youth fills half the poster. The other half is taken up by eight male heads, eight villains with evil expressions, each wearing a distinctive and readily identifiable hat. Among these enemies of the people are a monarchist, a capitalist, a Menshevik, and an anti-Bolshevik general. The caption reads: ‘It is a happy citizen who is acquainted with these types only from books.’

‘It’s no different from a cartoon,’ Vera says.

‘Exactly, and that’s why it’ll reach a good many Russians. It’s clear and simple and strongly pictorial.’

‘Maybe that’s the problem,’ Vera says, adjusting her scarf and hat so only her eyes behind her spectacles are visible. ‘What appeals to many Russians does not to us.’

‘Us?’

She has moved to another poster. It portrays an assortment of happy, healthy workers: miners, industrial workers, farm labourers. Presiding over the group is a proud, paternal Stalin.

‘Where are we?’ Vera says, nodding at the poster. ‘Where are the intellectuals?’

Yuri moves closer, his arm presses against hers. ‘I don’t think that pictures of solemn, bespectacled men and women huddled over books would provide the right impression of our revolution,’ he says quietly.

Vera removes her own fogged-up glasses, rubs them with a gloved thumb and replaces them. She peers more closely at the poster.

‘We’re never in the pictures.’

‘Does that matter? After all, we don’t need convincing.’

‘But we’re workers too.’

‘These poster people represent an ideal, something for ordinary citizens to strive for during these unsettling times.’

‘So these happy Soviet citizens,’ Vera points at the poster, ‘they don’t really exist?’

‘Hush,’ Yuri hisses. ‘Hush.’ He grabs the offending hand, and pulls her away.

Collectivisation is the centrepiece of Stalin’s five-year plan: huge farms with new equipment for more efficient production and greater yields. No one would challenge the benefits, but the implementation is testing the entire country. Stories of rich kulaks abound: their illegal trading and private ownership, their hoarding of grain that rightfully belongs to all the people, their refusal to work for the common good. These rich peasants are being rooted out and imprisoned, their land and livestock confiscated. Many have been executed.

Six months later, Yuri and Vera are standing in front of another poster, this one displayed outside a bakery. The corners have curled and the colours have been blanched by flour and sunlight, but the picture remains very striking. Most of the poster is taken up with a gargantuan female farm-worker painted in shades of red, and carrying a rake in her right hand. Her other hand is stretched out in warning, a stay-away gesture to a priest and two kulaks — three tiny grey figures who scarcely come up to her knees. The caption reads, ‘There is no room in our collective farm for priests and kulaks.’

‘There seem to be so many of them,’ Vera says to Yuri. ‘Not priests, but kulaks. How can there be so many rich peasants and all of them enemies of the people?’

Yuri hushes her, as he needs to do increasingly in these testing days. But as reports multiply of the huge numbers of kulaks arrested for wrongdoing, it is hard not to question.

As for the good peasants, there are shocking rumours: millions of them have died of starvation, and entire communities have been wiped out. There is a scattering of ghost villages across the land.

‘Not even the old aristocracy with all their greed and violence could claim such high casualties,’ Vera says.

The political leaders talk of the need to bear hardships now for the better future ahead. But as the number of dead mount, the cost exacted by the future seems shockingly high.

And yet it seems the leaders are right again. By the mid-1930s, after the hard years of collectivisation and the worst famine in living memory, the scaffolding of the new Soviet state is in place. The people are told of huge productive farms in the countryside, and of large-scale industrialisation in the cities. They hear of the successes blared through loudspeakers, they read about them in newspapers, they see them emblazoned across posters. The leader’s speeches are full of them. And they also hear that the whole world is watching the Soviet Union, that proletarians across the globe are uniting, that International Socialism will soon be realised. With so much at stake, it comes as no surprise to Yuri and Vera that Stalin orders the All-Union Population Census. Stalin wants hard proof of his successes.

Yuri and Vera should be gratified that their long-held ideals have finally been realised. But — and they could never have predicted this — they are no longer the confident revolutionaries they once were. They haven’t lost their faith in socialist principles, but they can’t, like many of their neighbours and colleagues, ignore the contradictions. There are power failures and gas leaks, they ride to work in rickety trams, people are cold and hungry, shops are empty of goods, tuberculosis is rampant, school-aged children wander the streets, and drunk men lie slumped in doorways.

‘They’re twisting the language to make us believe lies,’ Vera says to Yuri at the end of another weary day.

The Kogans have finished their dinner. The dishes from their meal are stacked up ready to be taken to the kitchen for washing; Lidiya is reading and Mikhail is doing puzzles. With the children close by, Vera keeps her voice low.

‘They’re lying to us, Yuri. We’re told that happiness is living in the Soviet Union under the protection of our great leader Stalin. But look at the reality.’ She takes a deep breath, and the words pour out of her. ‘We live in a room with four people and share a bathroom with fourteen. It’s been months since we last saw a piece of fruit. Our shoes are reinforced with cardboard and our socks are a tangle of darning. The electricity is unreliable; for hours at a time we’re reduced to using candles, and the supply of candles invariably falls short of the demand. In the battle between a heated building and the freezing months of winter, it’s the winter that always wins. The faucet in the bathroom has been broken for six months, and there’s no indication it’ll be fixed any time soon. I’ve spent a fair percentage of the past year queuing for goods that have often disappeared by the time I reach the top of the line. No matter that we feel demoralised and miserable, this, according to our great Soviet leaders, is happiness.’

Yuri is about to speak, to placate his wife. But Vera is not finished.

‘I’ve no complaint against the Department for Agitation and Propaganda. After all, there’s nothing wrong with persuasion, not when the message is right. But what if persuasion takes a form that obfuscates the truth? Even deliberately deceives?’

Snow is still on the ground, the river is still under ice, and heaped across the river’s frozen surface and creating a weird, other-worldly vista are icy hillocks now grey in the grimy air. The cityscape remains locked in winter, but already the days are longer, and at seven o’clock it is light outside. Yuri twists around and pulls the curtain across the window.

Vera is speaking quietly, but her distress is quite clear. ‘How would we know?’ she continues. ‘After all, if propaganda is effective you don’t recognise you’re in its grip.’

He shakes his head slowly, he has no more answers than does Vera. What they both do know is to keep their doubts to themselves. There are spies at work, spies in the kitchen, spies on the stairs, spies on the trolley bus, spies in the shop queues. People denounce others before they themselves are denounced. People denounce in order to prove their loyalty.

Yuri, like so many mathematicians, is recruited to work on the All-Union Population Census. In what appears to be grand work for the society he has long believed in, he buries his small doubts, and he’s determined to convince Vera to do the same with her larger ones. He tells her that the census, ordered by Stalin himself, will prove the success of the revolution.

Throughout 1936, Yuri is absent from Leningrad for weeks at a time, working in Moscow with other mathematicians and social scientists preparing the census. This huge enterprise, they are told, will be a triumph for socialism: it will reveal the extent to which living standards have improved, it will provide scientific proof of the success of Stalin’s reforms, and it will boost the people’s faith in the revolutionary project. Hundreds of thousands of volunteers have been recruited for this mammoth national undertaking.

After one sojourn in Moscow, Yuri returns home full of excitement. ‘I’ve seen Stalin’s handwriting,’ he tells Vera and the children. ‘Corrections, in his own hand, on one of the drafts of the census. That’s how committed he is to this project. Our General Secretary takes time out of his busy schedule to edit the questions.’

It is summer. The days stretch long into the night, the Leningrad winds are softer, and according to Yuri, there’s a mood of optimism throughout the country. He is convinced that Stalin would not be putting so much faith in the census unless he knew it would prove the success of his reforms.

‘If he knows so much,’ Vera the pragmatist says, ‘then why do we need a national census at all?’

Yuri laughs. ‘Hard data is better than hearsay. And besides, there are foreigners to convince. Communism is for the world, not just for Russia.’

Vera is not laughing. ‘You’re sounding like a sloganeer yourself.’

Misha glares at his mother. What would she know about the real Russia? What would she know about anything, holed up at her institute with her students and her translations? He’s proud of his father’s work. His father is working for Comrade Stalin, and when he’s older he, Mikhail Yuryevich Kogan, will work for Comrade Stalin too. In the meantime, he’s determined to be the first of his Pioneers group to be invited to join the Komsomol, and then, in another couple of years … well, he has plans.

Not that he’s been unhappy as a Pioneer. He’s loved the rules and rituals, the games and other activities, and best of all he’s loved being part of the struggle to liberate the labouring classes of the world. A year ago, in probably his greatest triumph during his time as a Pioneer, he was promoted to events secretary at the Pioneer Palace. This would have been an honour wherever it might have happened, but everyone knows that the Leningrad Pioneer Palace is the best in all of the Soviet Union. Their palace really is a palace, the former Anichkov Palace, where the last czar was born.

Within a few months and not long before census day Mikhail is a new member of the Komsomol. He puts himself forward for every task, he can’t do too much — although he needs to be careful, there are whispers, jibes, about the young, pushy Jew. Not that he’s aware, he’s happier than he’s ever been. He plans to take on leadership responsibilities at the first opportunity, and while he is not in the top academic level at school, he consoles himself with the thought that Stalin wasn’t a top student either while the traitor Trotsky was. Mikhail is planning his future. Stalin has surrounded himself with powerful people, many of whom have been drawn from the military or the NKVD, so there’s much to recommend both options. Most of his friends want to be mechanical engineers attached to industry, or construction engineers involved in Stalin’s massive building projects, but Mikhail wants a bigger canvas: he wants to take part in shaping the entire country.

Lidiya has been a member of the Octobrists since she was seven. She doesn’t want to recite the rhymes they’re forced to learn, she doesn’t care for the games they’re told to play, and she doesn’t like the songs that make up the Octobrist musical canon. She says it’s all too childish. With another eighteen months before she’s old enough for the Pioneers, she is refusing to attend her Octobrist group. While Vera, more than Yuri, has some sympathy for her daughter’s position, she knows there’s no place for defiance or independence in today’s Russia.

‘How can our children be so different?’ she says to Yuri one evening after a particularly trying day with Lidiya. ‘Misha could be a poster boy for Soviet youth.’ She sees Yuri is about to interrupt, and quickly continues. ‘He’ll be fine, he wants to fit in, he wants to do everything his country tells him. It’s far more difficult for our daughter, with a mind of her own and an imagination that owes more to Krylov and H.G. Wells — ’

And now Yuri does interrupt. ‘Our eight-year-old daughter is reading H.G. Wells?’

Vera laughs. ‘Not yet, but it won’t be long. She took my English copy of The Time Machine from the shelf and was curious about the script. After I explained about Cyrillic and Latin scripts, she wanted me to tell her the story of the novel.’ Vera shrugs. ‘What could I do?’

Census day is now just weeks away. Everything is in place. Printing presses across the nation are clacking away, and forms are stacked and packed, ready to be sent to far-flung regions. An army of enumerators has been trained to conduct the census, tens of thousands of staff have been recruited to tabulate the answers, and hundreds of statisticians are on hand to analyse the data. Everything is running to schedule, yet now Yuri is worried. He’s more worried than he’s ever been.

The problem is Stalin — not that Yuri voices this to anyone other than Vera, and even then the words feel like traitors in his mouth. Stalin has made it very clear that he expects the census to portray a citizenry whose belief in the revolution is rock-solid. It will show that no one wants or needs religion anymore; indeed, so convinced is Stalin of the success of the campaign against Russian Orthodoxy, he’s insisted that a question about religious affiliation be included for the first time on a national census. Stalin also expects the population of Russia and the Soviet Republics to come in at an absolute minimum of one hundred and seventy million — he actually expects it to be much higher. The population figure is, he says, of the utmost importance. It will provide hard evidence of improved diet and living conditions, as well as better health services and housing; it will reveal an increase in the birth rate and a decrease in the infant mortality rate, and, most importantly, it will demonstrate the success of collectivisation and industrialisation, his signature policies.

Yuri has done some preliminary figures based on the 1926 census, and there is good reason to worry. If there had been no campaign against the kulaks, if there had been fewer enemies of the people, if instead of famine and cholera there really had been better housing and hygiene, it is possible the population might stretch to one hundred and sixty-seven million — still short of what Stalin expects. And with disease, overcrowding and sanitary conditions as bad as ever, Yuri fears there will actually be increases in infant and child deaths, and a seriously blighted birth rate. The scientist in him welcomes the census to set matters straight, but the Russian in him tells him that the science of the All-Union Census has acquired a political agenda.

A mere forty-eight hours after census day, and Yuri knows he has been right to worry. The population figure will fall well short of Stalin’s minimum. But as bad as this is, it is not the only concern. On the census forms, unambiguously defiant, citizens in their millions have described themselves as Christian. (And whose decision was it to include a question about religious belief?) There’s the population problem and the religion problem, but equally shocking is that the census has given voice to the disgruntled whispers that have rustled through Soviet life for so long: in the margins of the census forms citizens have vented their discontent. Complaints and insults, anger and criticisms dirty the perfect results that Stalin requires — the perfect results the enumerators should have elicited. The census is a disaster. The people higher up are informed. No one wants to tell Stalin, no one wants to be the bearer of such news. But of course he must be told.

The All-Union Census of 1937 is immediately buried. Over the next several months the data is collected in secret, analysed in secret, and locked away.

‘Why bother to keep it at all?’ Vera whispers to Yuri, one morning, in menacing 2.00 a.m. wakefulness.

Yuri shrugs. ‘Perhaps Stalin has another use for it. Or perhaps he’ll prove the people don’t know what’s good for them. Perhaps he has plans to discredit the census with a follow-up study.’ None of which Yuri believes; he’s a mathematician, he knows the results are correct. It’s impossible to predict the General Secretary’s actions, but what is beyond doubt is that the data as it now stands undermines the Great Leader’s work.

While the census data is analysed and stored where no one can see or destroy it, those who have worked on it, particularly those in positions of responsibility, are far more exposed. The repercussions are felt almost immediately. In the first weeks after the census, several workers in Yuri’s division disappear. He is surprised at the choice of these targets.

‘They were middle-level,’ he says to Vera. ‘None was involved in the framing of the census.’

‘But perhaps they were among the first to identify a problem with the results.’

It’s another long night, Mikhail and Lidiya are asleep. Yuri and Vera are huddled together by the stove, trying to find patterns, reasons, explanations — not that reason has ever enjoyed top billing in explaining the workings of the Soviet leadership. Outside, winter rages. The window rattles, the wind howls, ice dashes against the glass.

‘These are only the first arrests,’ Yuri says softly.

The dark days grind on. Yuri is desperate to sever ties with the census and return to his old demography work. But without permission — and he won’t ask, won’t draw attention to himself — he must remain where he is. As one of the senior officers on the census, it is his task to apportion the questions to be analysed. It has come down from on high that if each analyst sees only one question, they’ll remain ignorant of the general thrust of the results. This is nonsense, but nonetheless Yuri, like everyone else, plays his part in the deception. The work is cloaked in secrecy; all those employed are aware that even a whisper could jeopardise not simply their livelihood, but their life. People are being arrested all the time, and as one of the leaders both in the planning and the analysis of the census, Yuri knows it’s only a matter of time before they come for him.

Whether at home or at work, these are perilous days. Yuri and Vera are watchful on the stairs, they’re watchful in the street, they’re watchful on trams and buses. Out in public, their conversation is empty; in shops, where informers are rife, they’re silent. Even where they believe themselves to be safe, they speak in whispers. Their voices became more and more hushed as the days stretch out of winter.

The essence of terror, the terror of terror, is helplessness. Yuri and Vera know there’s a disaster heading their way and there is nothing they can do to stop it. The NKVD always comes at night. Yuri and Vera hardly sleep anymore, and when they do, they never properly undress. Just that week, Vera packed the winter bedding away in the trunk. The bed is strangely flat, their own bodies making only the slightest mounds.

‘It’s not just me in the firing line.’

Yuri is warning Vera — not that she needs reminding — that when one member of a family is taken, others are likely to follow. It’s the price exacted by the state, and the cost of the better future. Vera is not one of those disenchanted Bolsheviks who cast a sentimental and distorting gaze back to the czars. But this, she says, what they have now, is not how it was supposed to be.

Lidiya feels the tension at home. Her mother is nervy, and her father, whom she hardly saw during the busy months leading up to the census, is now home every evening, often earlier than her mother. She watches him sitting in his armchair, a book face-down on his knee, his forehead crinkled with worries. She wishes she could think of something to make him feel better. Her brother seems unaware that anything is wrong; he is full of the Komsomol. He talks incessantly of new friends and experiences, the drills and exercises; he boasts that Komsomol members are being recruited to hand out flyers and put up posters; they’re even being used for crowd control. He says Komsomol members are told to keep their eyes and ears open; enemies of the people, he says, are everywhere. None of these tasks appeals to Lidiya, and she hopes that by the time she reaches Komsomol age the tasks will have changed. Misha spends less and less time at home; sometimes he stays away all night. ‘On Komsomol business,’ he says.

Like all Soviet children, Lidiya knows about Pavlik, the most famous Pioneer of all. A few years earlier, Pavlik and his younger brother were murdered by kulaks. After the deaths, it emerged that Pavlik had informed on his own father. Pavlik not only became a martyr to the great Bolshevik cause, but he was held up as a model for all children, a boy who was such a good Pioneer that he put his country ahead of his father.

Lidiya would never do as Pavlik did. Always she will be child to her parents first and a Pioneer or Komsomol member second; she cannot imagine a life without her mother and father. She is sure her brother holds a different view. Increasingly these days, Misha makes her uneasy, and she is relieved when he is not at home.

It is a mild night in mid-May when they come for Yuri Kogan. The air is still, the sky brilliant with stars, the moon a delicate sliver. Two vehicles pull up in the street. The stutter and burr of the dying engines is loud in the tranquil night. In the kommunalka everyone hears, everyone fears, for in the tumultuous times of 1937 this is not the first time the NKVD has come. Once, the Kogans might have felt safe in the knowledge that those who were taken must have erred in some way, but that was before the census.

Yuri and Vera are not asleep, they hear the cars in the street. As doors slam, and rough voices rise through the calm night air, they leap out of bed. They pull on their shoes — they’re already dressed — and wake Lidiya. She requires no explanation and quickly dresses herself. They hear voices and the clatter of boots on the stairs. Misha is already dressed; he’s standing at attention in full view of anyone entering the room. The footsteps stop; they’ve reached the third floor. Vera takes Lidiya by the hand, and they stand together in front of the window in a direct line to the door. Yuri positions himself on her other side and calls to his son. Misha doesn’t move; he holds himself apart from the family. All four of them stare at the door. The steps draw closer. The boots stop. Fists strike the wood.

Lidiya has only just turned nine, but for the rest of her life she’ll remember every detail of that terrible night, lodged in her mind as a series of discrete snapshots. There are five men standing in a semicircle around the open door. Three take charge of her father, three huge men to escort her papochka to goodness knows where. The other two will remain to collect evidence.

Her father is protesting, his voice shaky. ‘I’m a member of the party, I work for the party. I believe in our great Motherland. The General Secretary has my loyalty. I love Comrade Stalin. I’ve done nothing wrong. There’s been a mistake.’

Lidiya wants to run to him, hold on to him, drag him away from these men. She believes her father, he never lies. But the men are unmoved. ‘The party doesn’t make mistakes,’ one of them says, using exactly the same words she’s heard from her father’s lips.

‘It’s a mistake,’ he says again, reaching for Vera’s hand. Her mother doesn’t need to be told. She knows, like Lidiya knows, but it makes no difference to the officers.

Her parents kiss, her father’s hand strokes her mother’s cheek. He then turns to her. He lifts her up and holds her tight; his cheek is rough, he smells of tobacco and bedtime. And if she’d known this would be the last time she would ever see her father, would she have held on longer? Asked for some special words, or offered him some of her own? Snuggled into his neck so as never to forget the feel of him? The regrets will come later, but for now everything is smothered in fear and hope. Her father puts her down and approaches Misha to embrace him. Misha stops him with an outstretched arm. Her brother does not smile, he does not speak, his gaze flits to the watching officers, he wants them to notice.

Her father certainly does. He shakes his head slowly, and looks very sad. He turns to her mother. ‘I’ll be back soon. The party knows I’ve done nothing wrong.’

The big men hustle him through the door. ‘A mistake has been made,’ he says from the passage.

The two remaining men ransack the Kogan home. They pull books from shelves, and clothes from racks; they haul cartons from the high compartments, and drag bags from cupboards; they break bowls and plates, they toss ornaments aside. The floor disappears beneath the wreckage. And through it all, her mother is saying: there’s nothing to find, we are good Soviet citizens, we are party members.

They have a sack into which they put books and papers; in another sack they put the valuables: a kiddush cup studded with colourful stones, a small brass menorah that belonged to Vera’s parents, Yuri’s new boots, Vera’s amber ring, Lidiya’s doll. They pick up Mikhail’s soccer ball, but after glancing at the stern, silent boy, they put it down again. They take and take, and at last they leave.

There is laughter as they clatter down the stairs. There’s laughter as they enter the street. Lidiya stands at one side of the window, hidden by the curtain. She sees the light from their torches leaping and dancing across the building opposite; she doesn’t understand how torchlight can be so scary. She sees the men toss one sack into the back of the car and take the other into the front. She sees quite clearly the Kogan family kiddush cup: while one man holds the torch, the other tries to prise the stones loose.

The car won’t start. The coughs and complaints of the protesting motor rise high above the street and enter the despoiled space of Kogan family life. There are raised voices and curses, and more spluttering from the car engine. In the end the men are forced to push-start the car. At the street corner the engine kicks over, they jump into their seats, slam the doors, and disappear.

Every morning for the next three weeks, Vera Kogan goes to the Big House with provisions for her husband and questions for any official who will speak to her. The queue is long, some days she does not reach the top of the line. She will never know if Yuri receives her parcels. Every evening and long into the night, she calls on friends and colleagues of her husband, most of whom are reluctant to speak to her, much less offer help. Vera writes letters to party officials, she writes to the local Soviet deputy, she writes several times to Stalin himself. At the same time, knowing that she, too, could be arrested, she needs to make plans to keep her children safe.

Misha wants nothing to do with his father’s arrest. At fifteen, he might still be a child to his mother, but this is a boy who stubbornly knows his own mind. The morning after Yuri is taken, Misha slips out of the flat carrying a box of possessions. He leaves a note for Vera — not to allay her anxiety, so Lidiya will come to believe, but to stop her from attempting to find him. He writes that he will be staying with Komsomol friends, older fellows who will see to his welfare.

As always, Lidiya takes a different approach. She tries to reassure her mother with hugs and soothing words, she stands in line at shops, she helps prepare their meals. The other women who share the kitchen assiduously ignore both mother and daughter. They have their own families to protect.

Lidiya might well be old beyond her years, but at nine years of age she still needs looking after. Vera goes to see Marya, an old friend of her own mother. There are no grandparents, she explains. Nothing stands between the children and an orphanage if Vera is arrested. Neither she nor Yuri are enemies of the people so they should be released within a short time. While she says this without hesitation, she knows nothing is certain in these precarious times.

Marya needs no convincing. She packs a bag, and moves in with Vera and Lidiya. Should they come for Vera, it will be Marya, born more than sixty years earlier, a woman of the old school who secretly believes that despite the greatness of Lenin and Stalin, God in Heaven is far greater, who will look after Lidiya — and Mikhail, too, should he return.

Another night, and more boots in the passage, this time marching towards Vera. They check Marya’s passport and push her aside; they glance at Lidiya and push her aside too. It’s Vera they want. Two men take her away; two others remain for a perfunctory search. When they’ve finished, they pause in the open doorway, turn to face Marya and Lidiya, make a threatening gesture, and leave.

Mikhail does not return. Neither does Vera nor Yuri. It’s just Marya and Lidiya alone in the rooms at the kommunalka. Later, Lidiya will discover that her father was shot within days of his arrest. Her mother takes longer to die in the freezing plains of a Siberian labour camp. The official cause of her death is tuberculosis. It is more acceptable than exposure and starvation.

Four months after both parents are taken, nine packages addressed to Yuri in Vera’s handwriting are delivered to the kommunalka. These are the parcels left by Vera at the Big House to be passed on to her husband; the fresh food has been removed, and each parcel neatly resealed. The return of the parcels is code that Yuri is dead. The sick irony of this occurs to Lidiya only when she is older: that here is a regime which commits murder as frequently and as inconsequentially as an eye-blink, but could never be accused of petty theft.

In these days of terror, it is common to see grandmothers caring for young children. These poor mites suffering the loss of their parents are now forced to hide their grief, for the taint of parents condemned as enemies of the people flows through to the children. Marya instructs Lidiya that if asked about Vera and Yuri, she is to say they are away, doing important work for the Soviet republics. Lidiya has to appear happy, she must behave as if the parents she loves have not disappeared, she must stifle her great sorrow.

There come to be two epochs for Lidiya: the time before her parents are taken and the time after. In the new era, her parents are gone, her brother is gone, food shrinks to kasha and cabbage, clothes are patched, and shoes are improvised. And who does she blame? She blames Stalin, ‘the best friend to all children’, and she will never forgive him.

There is no hope. Forced to live her life in the negative, Lidiya nonetheless attends school, she does her lessons, she plays with her classmates. She does exactly what is expected of her as if nothing has changed, as if her days are not scarred by loss.

‘We have to be careful,’ Marya says, as she cuddles the child in her ancient arms and promises never to leave her.

And although Lidiya wants her mother, wants her so badly that her whole body hurts, she knows she has to be brave, she has to be grown up.

It has been decided.

Twenty-two years later, Lidiya herself became mother to a daughter. She looked down at the infant and swore she would protect her from all harm. For the first decade of Galina’s life, Lidiya never spoke of her own parents, and for the next decade only sparingly: she was determined to spare her daughter the penalties of a spoiled biography. By the time of Brezhnev’s funeral and the glimpse of Mikhail, Galina was no longer a child, and what little faith in the Soviet system remained to Lidiya after her parents were taken was killed off during the war. There was such inhuman suffering when Leningrad was under siege, such neglect from the central authorities, that Lidiya emerged from those nine hundred days decanted of any patriotism or desire for it. So when Mikhail appeared on the TV displaying the rewards of a life without a spoiled biography, Lidiya broke her silence.

By the time Galina left the Soviet Union, the story of her mother’s family had been told and retold. She had stored it in the safest chamber of memory, where it lay with a strange and quiet volatility. Through the many retellings, her mother’s history, so powerful and vivid, had become her history: the threat of those times, the fear, the terrible loss of a mother and a father, the shocking betrayal of a son and brother. And she, too, had come to hate Mikhail.

The story had expanded since Galina had come to Australia with all she had read about Soviet Russia. She’d been appalled to learn what the great revolution had cost the Russian people — the deliberate starvation of entire communities, the millions of deaths, the lies of the leaders. It was like suddenly discovering that a parent or a sibling, someone very close to you, was a vicious killer. And even if only a fraction of the claims were true, Soviet society had been, and probably remained, monstrously cruel, and Soviet leaders possessed of as little regard for its citizens as the wind had for the clouds it pushed around. She used to believe that in order to remain sane in a repressive regime, memory was forced to discard what it simply could not bear to hold. But the fact was, her own mother and people like her did not forget. Perhaps forgetting was the exclusive prerogative of the perpetrators, providing them with a well-oiled gateway to a guiltless future.

Here in sunny Melbourne, Galina saw happy faces and carefree children; there was freedom and opportunity in this country, but most of all there was an absence of fear. Yet she was all too aware that she, a Russian Jew, was formed by Russia — the Russia of her lifetime and the earlier Russia of her mother and grandparents. She might well be surrounded by freedom and delight, but she carried her past with her. It was as if she were inhabiting two lives simultaneously, and much of the time they were not an easy fit.

To know her past was to go some way to knowing her, so perhaps it would help if she were to share it with some Australians. Andrew perhaps. Take him back as a guest through the Brezhnev years to Khrushchev and her own birth, back to Stalin, the war, the terror, the revolution, back to the beginning. This, she might say to him, this is how I came to be who I am. She considered this only for a moment before letting it go. She suspected that to speak in Australia of her past was as impossible as it had been in the Soviet Union.